Frequently Asked Questions

What is KERN?

KERN is a bi-annually released set of radio astronomical software packages. It should contain
most of the tools that a radio astronomer needs to work
with radio telescope data. KERN is based on the latest
Ubuntu LTS.

I use KERN. How do I cite you?

How do I report a problem, or ask for a new package to be added?

Open up a bug report in our packaging
issue tracker. Please make sure that you are running the latest versions of the packages
you are using (run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade).
Note that a package in an existing KERN release is only updated
when there is a dramatically serious problem.

I want to help! What should I do?

What does the name KERN mean?

KERN means 'core' in Dutch and Afrikaans.

How does the release schema looks like?

We have a bleeding edge development repository (KERN-dev) that will be updated with the latest packages.
Ideally every half year we will freeze this repository and do a KERN release. This release will then only
contain critical bug fixes but not functional changes.

What about docker images?

we have prepared easy-to-use base docker image which you can use to create custom docker images
containers all the KERN packages combined with your own scripts.

The Dockerfile below is all you need to setup a docker container for any of the packages in
kern:

FROM kernsuite/base:dev
RUN docker-apt-install aoflagger

The kernsuite docker image is a clean ubuntu system with the kern suite repository enabled. It
also contains an up-to-date pip so you can directly install Python libraries. The
docker-apt-install
command is just a wrapper script that updates the apt cache before installing
the package followed by a removal of the apt cache. This is the best way to prevent adding of
clutter to your docker image and the image size to explode.

What about Singularity?

Of course we do singularity. See this
github repository for build files for building your singularity container.

Why did the first KERN release get version number 0?

KERN has a presuccessor named the radio-astro launchpad PPA. This PPA
is not updated anymore and renamed to KERN-0.

Why Ubuntu?

Ubuntu is one of the mostly used Linux distributions in (radio) astronomy, or at least in
Europe and Africa. For now we base KERN on the latest Ubuntu LTS with a delay of 6 months up to a year.
For
KERN-0 this was Ubuntu 14.04, following releases are based on Ubuntu 16.04. KERN-4 is based on 18.04

What about windows and Mac OS X?

Surprisingly KERN works quite well on Windows 10. You need
Bash on Ubuntu On
Windows. Note that you also need a Ubuntu Xenial (16.04) installation, which is currently
only included with the developer previews. On OSX we recommend to use Docker.

How do I stay up to date?

Can I mix KERN releases?

Not recommended and unsupported, but we are not stopping you.

I want to debug my application but there are no debug symbols?

Don't panic! They are actually existing but in a different repository.
You can enable the debug repository by editing
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/kernsuite-ubuntu-kern-4-bionic.list
and copying the line starting with deb and appending /debug to it.
It should look something like this: